


Swallowed Diamonds, Cold and Sharp

by Piscaria



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Comes Back Wrong, Gen, Loss of Identity, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 10:51:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12555824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piscaria/pseuds/Piscaria
Summary: Ciel died with his brother's screams ringing in his ears. Three years later, he woke to the same sound.





	Swallowed Diamonds, Cold and Sharp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chiiyo86](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/gifts).



> I hope you have an excellent Trick or Treat, Chiiyo86! Please enjoy this little trick.

Ciel refused to scream as the cultists dragged him from the cage. His brother screamed enough for both of them, throwing himself against the bars of the cage, hand outstretched as though he might single-handedly catch Ciel and drag him back inside. 

“Help us!” his brother screamed. “Someone! Anyone!” His breath was coming in short, ragged bursts. All this screaming with the cold of the cage, it couldn’t be good for him. He was going to give himself an asthma attack. 

“Be well,” Ciel whispered, though his brother couldn’t possibly hear him over the sound of his own screams and the cultists’ excited murmurs. In the candlelight, he could see the pentagram chalked onto the stone floor. A low, wooden table rose like an altar from the middle of it and — oh, this couldn’t possibly be good. He renewed his struggling, futile as it was against the many pairs of gloved hands that held him. Thanks to father’s self defense lessons, at his full strength, Ciel might have been able to take down one or two adults, even unarmed. But weeks of abuse and malnutrition had taken their toll, and the room held easily two dozen of the masked figures. They hefted him onto the table with little effort, pinning down his hands and feet. 

The knife glinted in the candlelight above him, and Ciel felt his blood run cold. In that moment, he sent his own desperate prayer out to the universe. _Please, let me be enough. Please, don’t let them get him, too._

He died with his brother’s screams ringing in his ears. 

He woke to the same sound, or thought he did. It took a second for him to realize the ragged screams came from his own throat. Molten flame coursed through his veins, searing long-dead nerve endings back to life. Spasms wracked his body, each one strong enough to arch his back off the steel table beneath him. Only the leather straps holding his limbs in place kept him from tumbling to the ground.

“Excellent, you’re awake,” a voice crooned. Ciel recognized it from somewhere, though he didn’t know where. He opened his eyes, tried to focus on the shadowy figure leaning over him. But his eyes burned like the rest of his body, and through the gray haze clouding his vision, he could only barely make out the shadowy figure leaning over him. 

The pain was easing a little, torment yielding to mere agony as pins and needles pricked a fast tattoo through every organ of his body. It hurt, but he could live with hurt. He was a Phamtomhive. ““Where am I?” he choked, throat raw from screaming. “Where’s —“

“All in good time,” the voice soothed. A clammy hand lay on his forehead, long fingernails raking through his hair. “You’ve had quite a trying day. You need to rest.”

Through all of the other pain, it surprised Ciel that he could feel the pinch of the needle in his arm. He tried to flinch away, but that single hand held him down with surprising strength. Again, the world went black.

In death, there had been no dreams. If the pain hadn’t been enough to tell Ciel that he was no longer dead, the nightmares would have done it. He dreamt of playing with Lizzy on the front yard while the house went up in flames behind them, his brother screaming from the window for Ciel to save him. He dreamt of the hands, the cage, of his own fear mirrored in his brother’s face as Ciel promised to protect him, somehow. He dreamt of the Phantomhive diamond sliding down his throat like a shard of glass, settling cold and brilliant in the pit of his stomach, while his brother said, “Just think of it like a piece of candy.” He dreamt of sitting on the bed with his brother in their matching sailor suits, waiting for the door to open, until it finally did, and — 

“Wakey, wakey!” the voice sang, dispelling the dreams like smoke. 

Ciel blinked awake. One of Father’s friends was leaning over him. Long, silver hair spilled over his black robes and an improbable black night cap drooped over his scarred face. Ciel remembered staring at this man in fascination from the doorway of his father's drawing room, his brother clutching nervously at his shoulder behind him. It took a moment for Ciel to remember the — no, not the name, precisely. What was it Father had called him?

“Undertaker?” 

“So you do remember me! I worries the process might have addled your brain. It did with all of the others.”

“I’m . . . alive,” Ciel said, testing the words on his tongue. The pain was mostly gone now. Instead, his body felt strange and heavy. He flexed his fingers, a little surprised when they responded easily to his bidding.

“Well, not quite.” Undertaker patted his shoulder reassuringly. “But you’re close enough.” 

“How did you bring me back?”

“It’s a complicated process,” Undertaker said. “I’m sure the details would only bore you. Let’s just say that one can do quite a bit with blood, especially given the right donor.” 

He tapped a fingernail against Ciel’s arm, and Ciel glanced down, realizing only then that a needle was bandaged to his wrist. It was attached to some sort of clear tubing, through which Ciel could see the bright red of fresh blood flowing down into his own veins. He shook his head to clear his sudden nausea, looking pointedly away. Never mind the _how_. Undertaker was probably right about Ciel’s getting bored, anyway. He’d never had his brother’s patience for science.

“Why then?” he asked.

Undertaker chuckled as if the answer was obvious. “Why, for revenge, of course!”

“For Father?”

“Among others,” Undertaker said, with an enigmatic smile.

“Did you bring him back, too?” Ciel knew he should feel something at the possibility of seeing his father again. Hope. Joy. Maybe fear. But he still felt dead inside.

For a moment, Undertaker drooped his head, regret written clearly in the set of his mouth and the sweep of his hair. “I couldn’t,” he breathed, the words sounding like a confession. “I wanted to. I tried. But they’d burned the body. There wasn’t enough left to resurrect. And as it was, it took me three years to perfect the technique before I dared try it on you.”

“Three years?” Ciel sat up in bed, the world spinning around him dangerously. “I’ve been dead for _three years_?” 

“Don’t worry,” Undertaker soothed. “I’m something of an expert when it comes to the preservation of corpses. You don’t look like you’ve been dead even a day. In fact . . .” He produced a hand mirror from some hidden pocket in his robes, presenting it to Ciel with a flourish. 

Ciel could only gape at his reflection. He’d expected something from a Gothic novel, a vision like Frankenstein’s wretch with cloudy yellow eyes and waxy skin barely concealing the muscles and blood vessels beneath. Yet the eyes gazing back at him from the mirror were wide and blue, bright as they’d been in life. His skin was pink, healthy. Still, there was something off about his reflection. It took Ciel a moment to place it, considering he hadn’t looked in a mirror since the day of the fire.

“I look older,” he said, realizing the truth even as he spoke the words. Some of the baby fat had left his face, and his cheekbones were higher, more pronounced. When he opened his mouth, even his teeth were larger. 

“Well, of course,” Undertaker said. “It’s been three years, after all. We can’t send you back into society looking like a ten-year-old. People would talk.”

“They’ll talk anyway,” Ciel pointed out, finally tearing his gaze away from the reflection. “I’ve been dead for three years! I can’t just waltz into society and pretend like nothing has happened.”

“Actually, you can,” Undertaker said with a brilliant smile. “You see, to the rest of the world, you’ve never been dead at all.” 

As he spoke, Undertaker unfolded a newspaper article, handing it to Ciel. It was the society page, clearly. A photograph took up a good quarter of the page. Ciel stared at it, feeling his mouth go dry. There was his brother, dressed in a top-hat and a ridiculously frilly cravat over a pin-striped jacket and matching short trousers, hand resting on the skull-shaped handle of a walking stick. Dressed in a matching frock, Lizzy clung to his arm, gazing up at him with all the affection she’d once showered on Ciel. Behind them, a dark-clad butler clearly played the role of chaperone, walking a discreet few steps behind. Automatically, Ciel read the caption below the picture:

“ _Earl Ciel Phantomhive and Lady Elizabeth Midford at the Crystal Palace Opera House_.” 

“What —“ Ciel stammered, unable to tear his eyes away from the photograph, from his own name in black and white. He knew he should feel something to know that his brother was still alive. Happy. He should have been happy about it. He’d loved his brother, in life. He’d prayed that he, at least, might survive their ordeal. But now, Ciel’s chest felt hollow and empty. Perhaps its was a side effect of death, or of whatever Undertaker had done to bring him back. 

“It was ingenious, really,” Undertaker said, pulling Ciel away from his thoughts. “Had he returned as himself, there would have been so much more scrutiny. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but your father was clearly negligent in your brother’s education. The Queen would have hesitated to give him the Earldom, let alone the role of Watchdog. But nobody could question Ciel Phantomhive’s preparation or commitment. And of course, he had the ring.”

Undertaker tapped one long fingernail against the photograph, where his brother’s hand curled over walking stick’s handle. Now that Undertaker had pointed it out, Ciel wondered how he’d missed the ring on his brother’s thumb, bright against his dark gloves. Though the photo was rendered in sepia tones, Ciel could practically see the flash of blue. 

He’d swallowed that ring their first day in captivity. Both of them had agreed that was better than to let their captors get hold of it.

“How?” Ciel asked, hearing the note of betrayal in his voice. Unbidden, his fingers scrabbled at the hem of his shirt, lifting it to expose a thick line of black stitches marching across the pale skin of his belly. Ciel shuddered.

“It was quite a feat to patch that back together, let me tell you,” Undertaker said, a note of pride in his voice. “The demon was none too careful when he removed it. I’m afraid you won’t be eating anything again, but that’s okay. All you’ll need are frequent transfusions to sustain you.” 

Ciel shuddered again. With great effort, he forced himself to drop the hem of his shirt back into place. He pointedly didn’t look at the needle in his arm. Instead, he took up the paper again, finally reading the article below the photograph.

> Though Earl Ciel Phantomhive and Lady Elizabeth Midford were betrothed in early childhood, some had privately speculated the arrangement might have died with along with Ciel’s parents, the late Vincent and Rachel Phantomhive. Yet today the two put all such rumors to rest, appearing together at the Crystal Palace Opera House. The opera was a rare break for the Earl Phantomhive, a famously tireless worker known for his cunning as the Queen’s Watchdog and equally shrewd business dealings as head of the Funtom Corporation, an internationally renowned toy and sweet company. 

So his brother had opened that toy shop he’d always wanted, and snagged the earldom besides. He had Ciel’s title. Ciel’s ring. Ciel’s fiancee. Even Ciel’s name. His brother had everything. And Ciel? He had a hospital bed, an undertaker for a nursemaid, and a drip-line of somebody else’s blood.

Something cold, heavy, and sharp with bitterness lodged itself deep in his gut where the ring should be. It took him a moment to name the sensation, unaccustomed as he’d been to it in life. Jealousy. It was the first real emotion Ciel had felt since waking from the dead, and he closed his eyes for a moment, savoring it. Such exquisite jealousy.

Had his brother felt like this, part of him wondered? Had he secretly harbored this bitterness in his gut as he watched Ciel go through the lessons that were forbidden to him, knowing in his heart that, were it not for the chance of Ciel being born a few minutes earlier, he himself might have been destined for the earldom? Had jealousy led him to cut the ring from Ciel’s stomach and place it on his own hand, to take Ciel’s name and his place in the world? If so, Ciel could almost forgive him.

Almost.

Ciel’s fingers closed over the paper, crumpling the article into a ball. When he spoke, his voice sounded like his father’s. “He can’t be allowed to continue with this farce.” 

Undertaker pushed his hair back, revealing green eyes sparkling with satisfaction. “My thoughts entirely, Your Grace.” 

“I want to know what he’s been doing for these past three years,” Ciel demanded. “His strengths. His weaknesses. Tell me everything you know.” His mind’s eye flashed to a memory of the nursery, the two of them lining up rows of pawns on either side of a chess board. His brother had always been a cunning opponent, but not unbeatable.

“It won’t be easy,” Undertaker warned. “He’s well guarded.” 

“I don’t care how hard it is! I want to replace him. As he did me.” 

“Very well,” Undertaker said. “Then first, I should tell you about his butler . . .” 

He had loved his brother in life. Ciel remembered this, vaguely, like a dream half-gone upon waking. Now, he felt nothing but jealousy, cold and sharp as a swallowed diamond. It didn’t fade, even as Undertaker described _how_ exactly his brother had made it out of that cage. Once, Ciel might have felt horror, even pity to picture his brother in such an unholy alliance. Now, the butler was simply one more piece laid out on a chest board, a cunning foe to be eliminated. 

Ciel had loved his brother in life, but that was before he’d taken up the mantle of Ciel’s identity and insinuated himself into Father’s old place at the heart of the underworld. The worst part was, by Undertaker’s account, his brother was _thriving_ in the role of Watchdog. He’d solved every case. Criminals spoke in whispers of the terrors that awaited in the Phantomhive mansion. The underworld feared and respected his baby brother, as it should have done Ciel. 

Ciel had loved his brother in life. In death, he thought he might learn to love revenge even more. 

 

The End.


End file.
